Khaberni - Mohammad Kananah, the director of the National Center for Curriculum Development and Evaluation, mentioned a series of reasons that led to the modification of the center's system and the creation of a question bank.
Kananah, through "Al-Mamlakah," stated that the global educational development movement and the development of evaluation processes necessitated changes to the system and the establishment of a question bank, in addition to charging the center with the evaluation task.
Kananah emphasized that the National Center has been entrusted with managing the general secondary examination and national tests, tasks previously handled by the Ministry of Education, noting that coordination between the ministry and the center continues.
About the rationale behind the updates and the creation of the question bank, Kananah explained that significant advancements in the fields of education and inclusive education led to the need for system changes.
He explained the need to keep up with the digitization of curricula and evaluations, and an increased focus on educational technology.
Kananah described the question bank as software that can provide a set of equivalent exam papers, through which justice and equality among students during evaluation are achieved.
He clarified that the bank, now in its pilot phase, is supplied with questions for four subjects (Arabic language, English language, Islamic education, history).
He continued, "The bank will provide accurate, reliable, and suitable models for constructing a test according to the required evaluation characteristics."
Yousef Al-Salaymeh, the director of the question banks unit at the National Center for Curriculum Development and Evaluation, said that the question bank is a programmed database containing a large number of questions, each bank holding thousands of questions that have been meticulously crafted in accordance with international standards and guidelines.
Al-Salaymeh added that the questions are reviewed scientifically and linguistically with precision, impartiality, and complete fairness and are tested on students before being finally adopted in the bank.
Al-Salaymeh pointed out that the question banks unit has detailed information about each question, such as who wrote the question, the date of writing, who reviewed it first and second, as well as the review dates and the language reviewer who oversaw it, adding that these reviews and checks are conducted before the questions are tested on students in actual testing scenarios to ensure the credibility of the experience.
He noted that the trials provide detailed information about the time the student took to answer the question, in addition to evaluating the question's difficulty and features, discovering any possible guesses in the answers, and also collecting data about the percentage of students who were unable to reach the question, as well as the percentage of those who left the question unanswered, confirming that this information helps in assessing students' ability to handle the questions.
He added that after the trial, the questions that meet the required standards are kept in the question bank, and equal models of examinations are adopted, as these equal models include justice, allowing comparison among all students in different schools and annual sessions.
Al-Salaymeh confirmed that the error rate in the questions is "zero," ensuring the accuracy and fairness of the evaluation.
Regarding the exam, he explained that there is a specification table that determines the relative weights of the axes and topics based on certain criteria, in addition to the work of committees comprising supervisors and teachers.
Al-Salaymeh continued that the specification table includes two main dimensions: the first is the difficulty of the questions, where the questions are divided into different categories: easy, medium, and hard questions, noting that usually, the medium-difficulty questions are the most repeated, but it is essential that exams include easy questions for motivational purposes and hard questions to distinguish outstanding students.
The second dimension in the specification table concerns the cognitive depth, relating to the ability that the student must possess to correctly answer the questions, where the questions in this dimension vary into three levels: the first focuses on measuring knowledge and understanding, the second relates to the application of knowledge, and the third measures higher-order thinking skills, according to Al-Salaymeh.
